Reflections



=**Our Castle on the Hill- Reflections on Unwrapping the Hexagon**= =** Matthew Cafiero, Lancaster TOK teacher and EE Coordinator **= Our IB workshop took place at the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West (UWC-USA), housed in the beautiful castle (shown right), in scenic (if somewhat lofty!) Montezuma, NM, USA. We arrived on June 21 from all over the US and from Costa Rica, and we met the next morning as strangers. Well, except for about 1/3 of the class who came from Minneapolis, but what can you do? We all had different backgrounds, different hopes and expectations for the session, but it was clear on the first day that we were among peers, friends we had just not yet met.

Cynthia Ballheim, our session leader, quickly set the tone. This session was going to be fun, collaborative, rich in both theory and example taken from her own considerable experience and from ours. By the end of the first night our heads were spinning in the best possible way, as each of us pondered what we had shared and how it would affect our work when we returned home.

On Wednesday, we took our leisure to reflect, and many of us went to Santa Fe to explore, to shop, to enjoy the company of our peers. But we arrived not just as tourists, but as critical IB educators seeing the world through the lens of TOK and of CAS. The Loretto Staircase, the O’Keefe Museum, even the famous Five and Dime which birthed the first Frito Pie (or so the locals claim)... All were seen with new eyes, with richer appreciation for nuance and relevance. We have been changed and bring the change with us now as we go out in the world, in the best of ways, not living the unexamined life.

As the session draws to a close, we hang tightly to the new ideas we have shared and hope that we can hold on to the vision of what our programs could and should be, once we return to the day to day work we have left behind. For five wonderful days, in our castle on the hill, we built a band of brothers and sisters, and we are thankful for the experience.

Matthew Cafiero 25 June 2010